This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Google Subtly Releases Offer Extensions For Google Search Ads

AdWords advertisers can now post a deal underneath their traditional Google search results ad, thanks to a program called Offer Extensions. Provided your account is upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns, this feature should be available now. Perhaps the best part of this program for advertisers is the pricing model of this feature, which is the exact same as if someone would click on your standard ad.
Source: Search Engine Land

Google Analytics Introduces Change History

Google has introduced Change History in Analytics. Change History keeps track of just about everything that happens in the admin area of your account. It records the date and time changes were made to users, access, account settings, profiles, site properties, goals and filters. It also makes note of the profile user (email address) that made the changes.
Source: Search Engine Watch

YP Claims To Be Second Largest Mobile Advertiser

Google is the clear leader in US mobile ad revenue but the company claiming to be the second place finisher is surprising. YP released a statement claiming that they have over $350 million in ad revenue attributable to mobile, making it the second to Google in the US mobile advertising industry. Facebook would probably disagree with that statement with $300 million in mobile ad revenue in Q4 alone. However, YP is the largest ad network dedicated to location based advertising.
Source: Search Engine Land

New Facebook Ad Partnership Makes It Easier To Target Ideal Customers

Facebook’s Custom Audience feature was launched last September as a way to entice advertisers with more granular targeting options. It appears that program’s pot is getting a little sweeter, with the recent announcement of a Facebook partnership with Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai. The move, according to Facebook’s own blog post, allows advertisers to optimize their ads using better data (privacy-protected, of course) from these providers.
Source: Search Engine Journal

Google In Violation Of Its Own Guidelines

Mere days after warning publishers about advertorials and levying a penalty to Interflora for running them, Google appears to be in violation of its own guidelines. Aaron Wall of SEO book points to a case from the Canadian newspaper, The Globe & Mail, which appears to have been running Google advertorials dating back to 2010. It’s likely, Google will have to penalize itself for the infraction, as it has in the past.
Source: Search Engine Land

AdWords Campaign Data Can Be Exported To Third Party Ad Networks Using Its API

As part of their antitrust settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission in January, Google agreed to allow ad campaigns to be exported to third party ad networks using its API. Google has since updated its AdWords API terms to reflect the change. In the past, Google would not permit automated, batch copying of AdWords campaign data for export to another ad network.
Source: Search Engine Land

Bing Outlines Its Payment Options for Paid Advertising

Bing recently posted a breakdown of their payment methods and options, including the choices advertisers have of when to pay their bills. The most recent bit of news in the post involves a new segment that breaks the pre-payment options down by specific country and/or currency.
Source: Bing Ads Blog

Matt Cutts Dispels Myth About PageRank And 301 Redirects

Matt Cutts took some time out of his Googley day this week to debunk a fairly widespread belief among SEOs that, with every redirect, a page’s PageRank is negatively impacted. Apparently, it’s not true.
Source: Search Engine Land

YouTube Experiments With Hulu-Like ‘Choose Your Ad’ Delivery System

YouTube is taking a page out of its competitor’s book, and is currently testing a program that allows video viewers to pick the ad delivery they prefer. It’s very similar to Hulu’s current system, which also allows people to choose either one longer ad right away, or a collection of shorter ads that break up the show/video.
Hulu discovered that this formatting was much more palatable for viewers, so it’s very understandable that YouTube would test something like this with its much larger base of users.
Source: Next Web

Marissa Mayer Doesn’t Like It When People Work From Home

One of the most widespread practices among tech companies is their flexibility with employees working from home (by choice or otherwise). However, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is putting a stop to that benefit at the floundering company, in the name of teamwork, communication, and general human interaction.
From Mayer’s perspective, and Yahoo’s situation, it’s hard to argue against the change. A struggling company can use as much of a collective morale boost as possible.
Source: Gawker

Facebook Has An Exploitable Privacy Flaw? Naw…

Nir Goldshlager: He’s not just a man with a last name that conjures up tastes of the popular cinnamon liqueur, he’s also a man that, until recently, had access to every single Facebook account because of a glitch in the social network’s privacy settings.
Obviously, the problem has been fixed, but it does little to build confidence in Facebook’s insistence that their system is secure enough to protect user information as long as accounts are active.
Source: Gizmodo

JC Penney Employees Spent More Time Watching YouTube Videos Than Working

Remember when JC Penney was a place that offered clothing to consumers at reasonable prices? Not so much anymore, and cat videos might have something to do with it.
Not really, but a recent Wall Street Journal article reported that 4,800 employees at the company’s Plano headquarters had racked up 5 million YouTube video views during the work day. Gawker’s breakdown concluded that, on average, that’s about 1,042 videos PER EMPLOYEE PER MONTH.
Honestly, you really, really have to work hard to be that lazy/addicted to videos. I wonder if Dr. Drew is opening a “Video Rehab” facility for his next VH1 exploitation show?
Source: Gawker

Notable Commentary

Certified Horse Meat Free

Why E-Commerce Will Never Completely Overtake Local Businesses

How many times have you heard someone say, “I’ll just get it on Amazon?” Constantly, right? Well, e-commerce actually only populates 5% of the United States’ retail market, with the other 95% belonging to brick and mortar stores.
Yelp’s vice president of business development, Mike Ghaffary, posits that yes, e-commerce is growing, but it certainly won’t be killing brick and mortar stores anytime soon. Many goods and services (such as books, music, movies, flights, hotels, etc.) are destined to thrive online, whereas just as many (if not more) industries are more conducive to offline revenue (restaurants, grocery stores, health clubs, etc.).
Analysis By: Mike Ghaffary, TechCrunch

How To Utilize Google Analytics To Determine PPC Success

Clicks and conversions; those are pretty much the most commonplace methods for judging the success of any one PPC ad or campaign. However, what if you work with a lead gen client that receives the majority of their inquiries over the phone, and call tracking can’t get to the granular level you need to view which ads are driving the best/most calls? Sam Owen has a great post at PPC Hero on how Google Analytics can fill in many of those gaps.
Analysis By: Sam Owen, PPC Hero

The Past, Present, And Future Use Of Review Filters In Local Search

David Mihm, the foremost expert on local SEO in the industry today, has put together a fairly expansive article on the SEOmoz blog discussing what local search filters are, and how they factor into local search algorithms. He goes on to speculate their roll in future rankings, and explains why, even at the behest of local business owners, filters are necessary for producing “great content.”
Analysis By: David Mihm, SEOmoz

Using Neuromarketing For Landing Page Improvements

People Love When Things Are ‘Free,’ Even If It’s Assumed Free

Is anything your business offers considered free? Even if it’s something as basic as free parking, or free smells (h/t to Jimmy Johns), you should probably say it your PPC ad copy. Nothing converts like a “free” product, service, or stimulation a sense.
Analysis By: Patrick, Convertasaurus

Leveraging LinkedIn Company Pages For Branding, Recruitment

On Monday, WordStream featured a great column discussing the often ignored benefits of building up company pages on LinkedIn. Describing the social network as the “nerdy, awkward cousin” to the much cooler Facebook and Twitter, Megan Marrs goes on to offer some interesting reasons why LinkedIn Company Pages are underrated for attracting talent and consumers alike.
Analysis By: Megan Marrs, WordStream

Five Studies That Offer Game Changing Copywriting Tips

Unbounce has an excellent post from Gregory Ciotti, who has compiled a list and some brief explanations of five recent research studies that can “drastically” alter your approach to copywriting.
Analysis By: Gregory Ciotti, Unbounce

The Difference Between Brand And Personality-Driven Real Time Marketing

Real-time marketing can be a very high risk, high reward proposition for brands looking to spread their name through a more humanized interaction with consumers. Rohit Bhargava explains how not all real-time marketing strategies are the same, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy.
Analysis By: Rohit Bhargava, RohitBhargava.Com

People Love Lists, And Here’s A List To Prove It

Did you know the Internet is full of lists that, regardless of quality, get consistent pageviews and shares? Dean Burnett tackles this topic with a clever list of 10 scientific facts that help explain this organizational phenomenon.
Analysis By: Dean Burnett, The Guardian

Don’t Confuse Median And Average

Brad Feld has a friendly reminder that “average,” derived by adding up all the numbers in a set together and dividing by the set’s size, is a very different metric than “median,” which is derived from lining up a group of numbers by value, and choosing the middle number.
Analysis By: Brad Feld, Feld.com

Be Up Front With Where Your Ads Will Send People

If you sell Star Wars shirts, and feature them in your display ads, don’t let the ad send users to a Star Trek page. PPC Hero has a guest post from BoostCTR that touches on this overlooked, but important practice. Such a simple promise to customers can drastically improve the user experience and, most importantly, conversions.
Analysis By: BoostCTR, PPC Hero